How the gold Nobel Prize medals were hidden from the Nazis

The gold in a Nobel Prize medal is dense enough to make a big impression when you try to take it through an airport X-ray scanner. It's also very resistant to being dissolved—but that didn't stop one chemist who needed to hide two medals from the Nazis, as Dr Karl Kruszelnicki explains.

A few years ago, a colleague of mine was leaving the town of Fargo in North Dakota after visiting his grandmother. He was at the airport and his computer bag was passing through the X-ray scanner.

Professor Brian Schmidt had just won a Nobel Prize. The Nobel Prize medal is made of gold, which is very dense. The X-ray scanner at the airport was showing a completely black circle inside his computer bag, which is very unusual. The dense gold was completely stopping the X-rays.

Sometimes, having a Nobel Prize medal with your name on it can be a death sentence.

And once the TSA officer had worked out that he was carrying a gold Nobel Prize medallion to show to his grandmother, everything was fine.

But sometimes, having a Nobel Prize medal with your name on it can be a death sentence.

This was the case in April 1940, when the Nazis invaded Denmark.

The trouble with gold medals

Some years earlier, two German Nobel Prize winners—one a Jew, the other a Jewish sympathiser—had sent their gold medals to legendary physicist Niels Bohr in Copenhagen for safekeeping, so they wouldn't get confiscated.

Sending gold out of Hitler's Germany was illegal. If the invading Nazis found the gold Nobel Prize medals engraved with the names of the German scientists Max von Laue and James Frank, it could have led to their executions.

So one member of Bohr's team, George de Hevesy, decided to dissolve the gold.

Like all precious metals, gold is pretty inert. But even gold won't stand up to aqua regia—a 3-to-1 mixture of hydrochloric acid and nitric acid.

The two acids work together like a super-destructive tag team. The nitric acid gets in first, ripping electrons off a few gold atoms at the surface, turning them into charged gold ions. Then it's the hydrochloric acid's turn. Chloride ions—the Cl in HCl—react with the charged gold ions, dissolving them.

Once all the gold ions have been mopped up this way, the nitric acid gets back in there and makes some more ions. Repeat indefinitely, and you can—very slowly—dissolve gold.

So as the Nazi invaders march through Copenhagen in April 1940, George de Hevesy started dissolving the two gold Nobel Prize medals that were "illegally" taken out of Germany.

And it would have been a race against time: these medals are not tiny—they are 66 millimetres across, weigh about 200 grams, and are 23 carat gold. But eventually the two medals disappeared.

De Hevesy placed the beaker of orange-coloured aqua regia containing the dissolved gold medals high up on a shelf, and left it there. Three years later, in 1943, Nazi-controlled Copenhagen was no longer safe for a Jewish scientist, so de Hevesy left for Sweden.

When he returned to the laboratory after the Nazi defeat, the beaker of orange-coloured liquid had not been touched.

Using some basic chemistry, he got the dissolved gold back as a precipitate, and sent the metal back to the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, who had originally awarded these medals.

The gold was then recast and re-presented to its original owners, Max von Laue and James Franck, in a ceremony in 1952.

While the hero of the story, George de Hevesy, went on to win a Nobel Prize himself, it doesn't take a genius to outsmart an army.

Sometimes you just need some basic—or in this case strongly acidic—chemistry.

Comments (1)

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Jim Martin :

23 Mar 2017 8:23:44pm

Thanks Dr Karl.I've always loved that story, but I had it wrong. I thought that it was Niels Bohr's medal that was dissolved.Would you please tell us all the story about the measures taken to get Niels Bohr from Denmark to Britain. Please Dr Karl.